My big problem is that children do work differently from adults, but there doesn’t appear to be a model for treating them like unusual people.
You might be interested in the Continuum Concept, then. The book describes the childcare practices of the Yequana and other indigenous cultures that treat children as if they’re differently-abled people rather than an underclass.
On first reading the continuum stuff, it’s easy to get caught up in the parts that have to do with physical contact, feeding, etc. of babies, as that’s where a lot of the discussion is. But the actual idea of “continuum” (at least as I see it), is that basically these cultures treated children as if they were “real people” from birth… as if they’re full members of the community, with the same needs for contact, participation, respect, trust, belonging, etc. as full-grown adults—and vice versa. (That is, adults aren’t deprived of play, empathy, touch, etc. either.)
Even as much as Eliezer speaks and writes about the subject, it’s still a bit of culture shock to see how fundamentally wrong our own culture is about the treatment of children, in ways that never occurred to me, even as a child.
For example, the whole permissive vs. strict dichotomy is irrelevant to a continuum culture: both permissiveness and strictness are too child-centric from the continuum viewpoint, because they both operate on an underlying assumption that children have to be treated differently from “normal” people, and that they’ll break or some other bad thing will happen if you don’t do something special to “fix” them (e.g. spoil them, punish them, spend time with them, whatever).
You might be interested in the Continuum Concept, then. The book describes the childcare practices of the Yequana and other indigenous cultures that treat children as if they’re differently-abled people rather than an underclass.
On first reading the continuum stuff, it’s easy to get caught up in the parts that have to do with physical contact, feeding, etc. of babies, as that’s where a lot of the discussion is. But the actual idea of “continuum” (at least as I see it), is that basically these cultures treated children as if they were “real people” from birth… as if they’re full members of the community, with the same needs for contact, participation, respect, trust, belonging, etc. as full-grown adults—and vice versa. (That is, adults aren’t deprived of play, empathy, touch, etc. either.)
Even as much as Eliezer speaks and writes about the subject, it’s still a bit of culture shock to see how fundamentally wrong our own culture is about the treatment of children, in ways that never occurred to me, even as a child.
For example, the whole permissive vs. strict dichotomy is irrelevant to a continuum culture: both permissiveness and strictness are too child-centric from the continuum viewpoint, because they both operate on an underlying assumption that children have to be treated differently from “normal” people, and that they’ll break or some other bad thing will happen if you don’t do something special to “fix” them (e.g. spoil them, punish them, spend time with them, whatever).